2025 Dec 11 #
- What are formal systems? - I'm very charmed by the idea that just the right mix of meaning and meaninglessness can generate power in the world.
2025 Dec 10 #
2025 Dec 01 #
- Is there a general skill of “management”? - "[T]he kernel of my argument for the existence of a general skill of management is that it is pretty obvious that there is a general deficit or 'negative skill' of _mismanagement_, which equally obviously appears to work in roughly the same way in a variety of fields, and that therefore an opening stab at a definition of the general skill of management would be that it’s the absence of this deficit."
2025 Nov 26 #
- Large Language Models and Emergence: A Complex Systems Perspective - “Minimally, emergence describes the reorganization of a system that can support a new, often smaller description, that screens off microscopic details not essential to predicting the future of a system. Emergence matters because it leads to an enormous cost saving in how systems are described, predicted, and controlled. We do not need to use quantum mechanics to build a bridge because the classical world emerges from the quantum—a fact exploited by engineers.”
- My Life Is a Lie - “Altruism is a function of surplus. It is easy to be charitable when you have excess capacity. It is impossible to be charitable when you are fighting for the last bruised banana.”
- The Trillion-Dollar Cost of IT’s Willful Ignorance - "It may be a forlorn request, but surely it is time the IT community stops repeatedly making the same ridiculous mistakes it has made since at least 1968, when the term “software crisis” was coined. Make new ones, damn it."
2025 Nov 18 #
- A Month of Chat-Oriented Programming - "[...] I got Claude to write well over 99% of the code produced during the month. I found the experience infuriating, unpleasant, and stressful before even worrying about its energy impact. Ideally, I would prefer not to do it again for at least a year or two. The only problem with that is that it “worked”. [...] Against my expectation going in, I have changed my mind. I now believe chat-oriented programming (“CHOP”) can work today, if your tolerance for pain is high enough."
2025 Nov 13 #
2025 Oct 21 #
- On AI and the golem - “We are teetering on the edge of the collapse of this particular bubble, and there’s no doubt that ordinary people who didn’t waste precious resources generating sub-par horny images are going to pay the price. Unfortunately, there is very little I can do for us in that regard. What I can do is highlight the fact that the people of the past already answered the philosophical questions surrounding this particular bad idea for us. As we are constantly told that the arts and humanities have no value, and that we can have machines do that work for us, I think this is an important reminder. To be human is to do the work. For better or worse.”
2025 Oct 17 #
- Choosing friction - That feeling when you're pretty sure you've found one of your people.
- Right Turn of Death - What the what the right-turn-on-a-red-light is _younger than I am_ and was a largely-ineffective idea to save gas during the oil shocks of the 1970s.
2025 Oct 15 #
2025 Oct 09 #
- Who Goes Nazi? - From 1941: “It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi.”
- Dewaffling the tech industry
2025 Oct 08 #
2025 Jun 25 #
2025 Jun 08 #
2025 Jun 07 #
2025 May 15 #
2025 May 04 #
- How to Structure a Clojure Web App 101 - “What has been a challenge is explaining what exactly it is that these libraries do. Doing that - really doing that - requires a mountain of shared context that folks simply do not have.”
2025 Apr 04 #
- On the foolishness of 'natural language programming' - “It was a significant improvement that now many a silly mistake did result in an error message instead of in an erroneous answer. (And even this improvement wasn't universally appreciated: some people found error messages they couldn't ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate "the ease of programming" with the ease of making undetected mistakes.)”
2025 Feb 21 #
- HUMAN_FALLBACK - A wonderfully-written memoir of time spent being behind the curtain of a Potemkin AI.
- Why Clojure? - An overview of what makes it a pleasure to work in.
2025 Feb 11 #
- Situated Software - Re-reading Clay Shirky articles I first read before the Facebook era just hurts. I hear a Ron Howard Arrested Development Narrator voice in the back of my head saying, "But unfortunately, Facebook."
- An app can be a home-cooked meal - If “learn to code” were meant the same way as “learn to cook.”
2025 Feb 06 #
- You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism - “You can discourse and quote-dunk and fact-check until you’re blue in the face, but at a certain point, you have to stop and decide what truth you believe in. The internet has conditioned us to constantly seek new information, as if becoming a sponge of bad news will eventually yield the final piece of a puzzle. But there is also such a thing as having _enough_ information.”
2025 Feb 02 #
2025 Jan 31 #
- CodeCharta - Codebases visualized as architectural models seems very much like my jam.
- A Rant about "Technology" - “Technology is the active human interface with the material world. But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources. This is not an acceptable use of the word.”
2025 Jan 30 #
2025 Jan 27 #
2025 Jan 26 #
- JAR on 'Object-Oriented' - "Because OO is a moving target, OO zealots will choose some subset of this menu by whim and then use it to try to convince you that you are a loser."
- In defense of blub studies - "So I always feel a little bit embarrassed and boring when I instead suggest going really deep on what you already know: your main programming language, web framework, object-relational mapper, UI library, version control system, database, Unix tools, etc. It’s not shiny or esoteric, but for me, building a detailed mental model of those (and how they compare to alternatives) might be the learning that’s contributed most to my effectiveness as an engineer."
2024 Dec 28 #
2024 Dec 27 #
- Ghostty - Ghostty came out yesterday, if you're into terminal emulators.
- filipesilva/datomic-pro-sqlite - Datomic is so abstract on the storage end that it took me a long time to figure out how to ... store stuff. Thus, I am really liking this docker image for quickly setting up a transactor that uses sqlite. (For low to medium write volumes this seems fine, since architecturally nothing is competing with the transactor for writes anyway.